I’ve just finished reading Flying Lead Change by Kelly Wendorf, and though it centres around work with horses, the heart of the book is much broader. It’s a field guide for being human, especially for those of us seeking to live and lead from a deeper place.
The book weaves together nature-based intelligence, indigenous knowledge, contemplative traditions, and neuroscience. It speaks to something many of us quietly yearn for: the return to connection, within ourselves, with each other, and with the wider world.
We live in a culture shaped by speed, separation, and left-brain dominance. So much of modern life urges us to act quickly, to produce, to react. But Flying Lead Change invites us to listen differently. Not with the rational mind alone, but with the heart. In doing so, it reminds us that wisdom often doesn’t arrive as a thought, it comes as a feeling, a quiet knowing.
The author introduces seven organising principles: care, presence, safety, connection, peace, freedom, and joy, drawn from how horses live. While the equine lens may not speak to everyone, the essence of these values is strikingly human. What would it mean to lead, to parent, to create, or simply to be, from this place?
Each chapter ends with what the author calls a Spiral Point, exercises and reflections that gently nudge us inward. They offer a way to pause and ask: Who am I, underneath all the doing? What is guiding my choices? How much of my day is spent in presence, rather than reaction?
Presence is a recurring theme. Not just being present, but being in presence; meeting life with open senses, a softened heart, and the humility to respond rather than control. This is not a passive state, but a powerful one. Presence fuels intuition, grounds action, and opens the door to what wants to emerge.
The book also touches on shame; not as an emotion alone, but as a system. A system that tells us we’re only worthwhile if we’re efficient, fast, always producing. And yet, many of us are quietly weary from the effort of trying to stay ahead of an unnamed fear. What would change if we could stop skipping like stones across the surface of life, and instead, sink more deeply into ourselves?
Flying Lead Change doesn’t offer a 10-step formula. It offers something quieter and perhaps more radical: an invitation to return. To tend to presence, to listen more than we speak, to let beingness inform our doing.
In the end, it’s not about horses. It’s about us.
